


The Lady of the Marches

by AellaIrene



Series: Once and Always [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-01-12
Updated: 2012-01-12
Packaged: 2017-10-29 09:47:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/318578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AellaIrene/pseuds/AellaIrene
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Keladry of Mindelan finds her way to Narnia. Forty years later, she gets thrown back. A Chronicles of Narnia AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bedlamsbard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bedlamsbard/gifts).



> This fic takes place down one leg of the Trousers of Time of bedlamsbard's [Warsverse](http://bedlamsbard.dreamwidth.org/410335.html). You don't have to read Warsverse to understand it, but a) it helps and b) it is excellent fic.
> 
> While this fic is an A Song of Ice and Fire crossover, it is not particularly heavy. The characters appear, but are not main characters. Yet.
> 
> Beta'd by burntcopper.
> 
> Happy birthday, bedlamsbard!

_It has been said that a daughter invariably grows in the image of her mother, however she will fight it, for a woman raises her daughters in the way they will go, walking their path._

 _If this is so, then I beg my age to hasten, for, whatever the name or nation of she who bore me, my mother was Keladry of Glasswater, and I would have her walk these lands once more._

Nadia of Glasswater, Philosopher

On his last night in Cair Paravel, Peter went to speak with his wife. His path was not hard, but it was slow: at every turn he paused, thinking, _This is the last time_. The last time he would take that staircase, would see the familiar view of the harbour and the Shifting Market through the latticed marble of the gallery. The last time he would stop, for a moment, because he was standing in the perfect spot to hear the sounds from the nurseries, and the laughter of the children always made him smile.

He spent longest there, listening to his grandchildren-- gods, his grandchildren, and the eldest old enough that she had her own rooms, even if she did come back to play with her little brother and her cousins. At last, he made himself move again.

Kel was in the gardens. He could see her from the terrace, sitting on a stone bench between two terracotta pots, and Chiara, the head of her personal guard, was sitting in the last patch of sun, cleaning her paws as finickily as any smaller cat. She bowed as he passes, and Kel looked up, and over her shoulder.

“Peter.”

“Kel,” he said, and sat down next to her. “I thought you’d be here.”

“After thirty years,” she said, “I’d be more worried if you couldn’t have guessed.”

He took her hand, and didn’t answer. It was bare, but for the plain gold band he had put there so long ago. When she stretched her fingers, absently, he could see the tendons move beneath the skin, the line of the scar, invisible in the dim light, where a Lascar did his best to take her fingers off.

From their seat, you could see a sliver of the Market, and the great expanse of the sea, rich and dark as midnight, and Peter thought that he would miss even that, though probably not the uncontrollable vomiting.

“Susan and Jaime,” Kel said eventually, “Are having a last supper with their children. And grandchildren. And eventually Alysanne, when she tires of Edmund’s attempts at a last minute reconciliation--”

“I told him that was a stupid thing to do,” Peter said absently.

“I know, but if Ed ever took advice from either of us about dealing with his children, he wouldn’t need to take it now.”

Peter’s hand tightened on hers. Kel said nothing.

“You’re not going to say anything?” Peter asked, because time had taught him that sometimes saying the obvious was better than saying nothing at all.

“No. You believe this is right, do you not?” she asked, looking down momentarily, and then across to the harbour.

“It is in my heart,” Peter said, feeling himself switch to the more formal cadences, “That this is right and meet. The old must be gone for the young to grow, and we were not born here, after all.”

“Nor was I,” Kel said. “I haven’t been having visions.”

Peter kissed her hand, to hide his smile. The only person he knew less prone to visions than Kel was their son James, who greeted all magic with a determined skepticism, and a list of questions.

“I know,” she said. “And you believe that you are doing the right thing, and so you probably are-- you are irritating that way--”

“My thanks, my lady Duchess.”

“But I would still much prefer not to lose my husband,” she finished, and Peter turned her in his arms to kiss her.

By the time they separated, there was a ring of great cats sitting around them, Chiara and his own Ashabi first among them.

“It’s not my place to say,” Ashabi said. “But their highnesses have a surprise planned, and if you’re not in soon, you’ll miss it.”

“Do we want to miss it?” Peter asked hopefully but Kel was already rising, and so he followed suit, sighing a little.

“Lady Briony’s been meeting with Masongnonese traders,” Chiara said.

“If she blows anything up, I’m blaming your insistence on teaching her alchemy,” he told Kel, putting an arm around her.

“I would expect nothing less,” Kel said placidly, and they went in together.

*

The first thing Kel saw was the sunlight. Not the light that had been there when she went into the caves: warm yellow, dappling through the tree leaves, but cold and sharp. It stung her dark-adjusted eyes, and she stumbled a little, blinking away the water that came, and put her hand out to catch herself on the tree. She stopped, eyeing the sharp. The tree was familiar, but it was no Narnian tree. It had not been there when she went into the caves.

It was a Tortallan tree. It was the tree she had tethered Peachblossom too, when she dismounted, so long ago, and went to see what was within the cave.

Tears stung her cheeks as she realised that he wouldn’t be there, all the grief she had not let herself feel, before. Peachblossom would be---

She heard a familiar noise, and wiped the water from her eyes.

Peachblossom was there. Right where she had left him, tethered to the tree, looking mildly annoyed. She stretched her hand out to him, and he whickered, and sniffed her palm, delicate.

“Peachblossom,” she said, and stroked his nose in wonder. His breath was warm, and this was strange beyond anything.

She mounted without even thinking about it, and turned Peachblossom in what she thought was the direction of New Hope. The memory had faded, over the years, and she had a headache from the too-sharp sun. Peachblossom knew the way, though, and all Kel had to do was hold on, which was rather a relief. She’d spent the last three weeks tracking a rebel band through the Eastern forests, and she was exhausted. Even before she’d travelled between worlds.

They reached the main New Hope road, and Kel stood up in her stirrups to get a proper look at New Hope. It looked oddly small, now, and humble, after years of the great Narnian forts, and never being billeted in anything smaller than a decent sized inn. But it had been where she’d learned her trade, learned most of the skills that had served her in Narnia.

The harvest was coming in, and, as she reached New Hope, people who weren’t bent over, or otherwise occupied, raised their hands in greeting. She raised her hand back, and then took hold of Peachblossom’s reins again, feeling a little light headed.

By the time she made her way into the fort, she felt worse, and worse still when Merric shouted down from the walls, and thundered down the staircase. It felt a little like a hangover, except that she didn’t want to be sick, and she had never yet had a hangover that made people go blurry.

“Kel,” Merric said. “You’re back early: did something happen?”

“No,” Kel said, and dismounted, feeling the shock run up her legs as Tobe came to take Peachblossom. “No, nothing happened.” How would she explain it? How could she? _I went to another world, and there I was a General and a Duchess, and there I was married, and then I came back and it was as though no time had passed at all._ They’d say that she was mad.

“M’lady?” Tobe said, frowning a little.

“Tobe?”

“Did you want me to fetch Sir Nealan, m’lady? He said he needed to speak to you, when you got back.”

“I-- no. Not right now.” Neal would see straight through her. She stepped back from Peachblossom, and swayed a little.

“Kel?” Merric said, and his voice sounded like he was very close, and then very far away, far quicker than he could have moved. He put a hand under her arm, and she looked over at him. “Kel?” he repeated. “Are you alright?”

“Fine,” she said, “I’m fine.”

“You’re not,” he contradicted her immediately, “You look awful. Hi, you, fetch Sir Nealan!” The armsman being pointed at scurried off, looking back over his shoulder at them.

“I’m fine,” she repeated, and pulled away to prove it. For a moment, she stood clear, and then darkness spiraled, and the ground came up to meet her.

*

Peter really quite enjoyed weddings, as long as it wasn’t his children getting married. Ilane's first wedding had been bad enough, and that hadn't actually happened. Her second wedding, which had, had been marked by the near outbreak of war between Narnia and Terebinthia during the wedding feast, and he hated to think how the others would attempt to top them.

Tyrion’s wedding, on the other hand, was going wonderfully, and all Peter had been required to do was welcome the Princess Zaira, and her mother Princess Meloria, who had been thankfully unmolested by harpies on their journey, preside over an enormous family feast, and be cheerful to people who he encountered in the halls. Susan and Jaime had done the rest.

Down on the dancing floor, the musicians struck up a traditional Narnian tune, and some of the Shoushani delegates retreated. Others, bolder, or simply better dancers, stayed, and more Narnians took to the floor. Peter leaned back in his chair, grateful for the excuse of his bad leg, and looked for Kel. She was as tall as most of the men in the room, and wore a coronet besides, so it was easy to find her, dancing with Fio. He couldn’t tell who was leading, not from this distance.

He was the only one occupying a throne: Susan and Jaime were dancing together, Lucy had disappeared earlier, in the direction of the mead, and not returned, and Edmund was dancing with Meloria. Even the heirs’ thrones were unoccupied, all the children being younger, and able to dance all night and go hunting in the morning without a second thought.

A servant-- a part-faun, with tiny horns poking up through her thick, dark hair, brought him another glass of wine: Shoushani red, a gift from the bride’s father, who owned most of the best vineyards in the Empire. He drank deeply, watching the twists and eddies of the dancing, as the Narnian dance ended, and some dancers, Kel and Fio among them, retired from the floor.

Fio went off towards Osumare, who had taken advantage of having a wooden leg to declare that he would not dance, and Kel mounted the steps of the dais.

“A good dance?” he asked, when she was close enough that he could see not just the flush in her cheeks, but the sweat that had sprung up at her hairline and between her breasts.

“A very good dance,” she said, and sat neatly on the chair provided for her. Her coronet glinted against her hair, and Peter smiled.

“You are blinding, my dear.”

“Blindingly beautiful, or at a bad angle?”

“Both,” he said, after a considering moment, and she laughed, and took his hand. He twined his fingers with hers, comfortably, and leaned forward in his chair, to rest his forehead against those. Kel smiled at him, and, for a brief moment, he could fool himself that they were alone, instead of at a great feast.

“Just a few hours,” Kel said. “We can leave at midnight. Only the younglings need to dance until dawn.”

“With our children, it’s hardly ‘need’, it’s ‘want’,” Peter pointed out.

“Either way,” she said, and kissed him, soft and quick. He pulled back, and looked down at the dance floor, and around at the court. Ilane was dancing with Tyrion, now, and Maja with Zaira. James was just visible, twirling young Alysanne as the flowers came out of her hair, and Anders and Adalia were bouncing around with more vigour than grace. William had disappeared, presumably in search of mead.

He was looking for Cal and Vanna when Edmund came up the steps.

“You two should dance,” he said without preamble.

“Bad leg,” Peter retorted.

“Not that bad,” Edmund said, folding down into his chair. “Dance with your wife, make the people happy. And then you can leave.”

It was a tempting thought, he admitted. He was too old to stay up late and dance, though that was slightly alarming to think of. He’d even stopped working through the night: that was Ilane, Saiet, and Tyrion’s game now, and would be Cal’s after his birthday.

“Well, your highness?” he asked, lifting Kel’s hand to his lips. “May I have the next dance?”

“You may,” she said and they rose together, making their way down the steps as the dance ended. The musicians clearly saw them: there was a moment of chatter, and then they struck up, something slower, a little more stately. Something almost designed, Peter realised, with a small smile, not to be too hard on his leg.

He smiled at his wife, and began to dance.

*  
Kel woke in the dark. For a moment, she stared up at the ceiling, trying to work out whose bed she was in: not her own, the canopies were wrong. They weren’t Fio’s, or Osumare’s, for the decorations were wrong for those as well. Some progress bed, perhaps?

She sat up, and memory hit. She was not in Narnia. She was in Tortall, forty years and no time at all after she had left.

And she’d fainted, in front of the entirety of New Hope. Wonderful.

She appeared to be in her own room, at least, and Tobe wasn’t sleeping in front of the fire, which was something. She slid around, carefully, and climbed out of the bed, to refamiliarise herself with the surroundings. No canopy on her bed, against the cold winter nights. Small windows, well shuttered, with northern style carvings. A decently sized fireplace. One rug on the floor: a rag rug, nothing like the Calormene carpets they’d had from one of the times Narnia and Calormen had been at odds. Osumare had captured a Calormene trading vessel, and taken the taxes it had been trying to cheat out in carpets.

After forty years, all of it was strange, and she had a feeling that New Hope itself would be even worse. All of this to relearn and get used to while she tried to work out what was going on, because whatever had happened wasn’t natural. She’d been in a gods damned cave, and come out in another. It wasn’t like her hazy memories of coming to Natare, when she had been in the cave, and then in a great wood, with pools of water in glades. She had bent, to drink from one, and found herself in the Whispering Woods of Natare, two miles from a Red Company recruiting station. There had been none of that. She had merely gone into the caves, taken a turn ahead of James, and found herself in Tortall.

There was a tapping at the door, and she stopped in the middle of the room, feeling self-conscious, and oddly guilty, then hurried back to bed and pulled the covers up to her nose.

“Yes?” she called, and the door creaked open. Neal put his head around it.

“How are you feeling?” he asked anxiously. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“No,” Kel said, stretching her legs under the covers. They went easily, with none of the slowness, the aching, that had characterised her waking in Narnia. Her hands felt different, too. Less stiff, and, as far as she had seen, not liver spotted.

“Good,” he said, and came fully into the room, frowning at her. “What happened to you? You were gone less than an hour, and you came back exhausted. It was as though you hadn’t eaten in weeks.”

“Oh,” Kel said, mostly to fill the silence. Neal came over, frowning a little deeper, and put his hand to her head. He smelled of mint, and medical herbs, and she shut her eyes and breathed it in.

“Better,” he said grudgingly. “But I’d still like to know how you had so little iron, your monthlies were two weeks ago--”

“Neal!” she protested, eyes flying open.

“Well, they were! So it wasn’t that, and you haven’t been greviously wounded recently--”

She supposed that answered the question of whether any of the scars under her clothing had remained.

“So what happened?” He crossed his arms over his chest, waiting.

“I don’t know,” Kel said truthfully.

Neal huffed. Kel breathed in, drawing up her mask, what had once been her Yamani mask, before thirty years married to Peter Pevensie had given her a better one. Maybe Neal would think she was mad. Maybe he would give her soothing drinks, and go away and tell people that she needed rest, but he wouldn’t betray her. Not Neal. Not after ten years.

“This is going to sound strange,” she said. “This is going to sound mad, and I’m not, but I don’t know how to convince you of that, except to say that if I was mad, I probably wouldn’t think that this sounded mad.”

Neal raised an eyebrow.

“Come here,” she said. “And sit on the bed.”

He obeyed, ending up sat cross-legged in front of her, after she drew her knees up to let him.

“I was only away for New Hope for an hour or two, but for me, more time passed. Much more.”

Neal leaned over, and touched her forehead. “No fever,” he said. “Carry on. How much time?”

“Forty years,” Kel said. His jaw dropped, and she waited to see if he would decide that hysterics were the order of the day, or if he would, as he sometimes did, become utterly, implacably serious.

“Forty years,” he repeated. Apparently, he was stuck on astonished.

“Yes,” she said. “It sounds mad, I know it does, and I would think I were mad if anyone told me this but-- Neal, I had children. I know how it feels to have a baby. I know how it feels to _have sex._ ”

“I did not need to know that!” Neal protested. “I could have worked it out from you having had children!”

“I had children,” she repeated. “And then I had grandchildren, and I had arthritis as well. My hair went as white as my mother’s is. Someone tried to cut my fingers off, and they ache in cold weather.”

Neal lifted her hand, and she reached out and traced the line where the scar had been.

“I was wearing leathers,” she said, in answer to the question he hadn’t asked.

“Kel,” he started, and she went on, ignoring him, “I was a soldier, and a Governor, and I helped rule a country. I sailed almost to the end of the world, and I saw Tethys and Neptune argue, while Calypso refused to take sides, and I held my daughter Vanna on my hip. I bore six children, five of them my husband’s, and I raised his son by my best friend, and I adopted two more daughters, and I saw all of them to adulthood.”

She could almost feel the wind in her face, the salt that chapped her lips, the way her horsetail of hair had brushed her back through the thin linen of her shirt. Osumare had put his hands on her waist, and leaned against her back, and they had watched, in silence.

“I see,” Neal said slowly, and reached over to cup her face. She felt his Gift, and nearly jerked. She’d never felt it like that before. The cool tendrils as she was Healed, yes, but not like this, this awareness of where the magic was, and what it was doing to her.

“No bleeding in the brain,” he said after a moment. “And that truth spell I cast isn’t revealing anything either.”

“It is the truth, Neal, I swear it.”

“I believe you,” he said, and she frowned.

“That quickly?”

“Well, you aren’t actually insane. I mean, you are, as the Scanra incident would suggest, but you’re not insane in this particular way. And it explains the exhaustion.”

“Oh.”

“And I’ve read a few books about this sort of thing. It hasn’t happened since the Immortals were bound, and then it only happened in certain places: stone rings, and certain caves. Most of the records are from Barzun, but then, this part of Tortall was Grimhold then, and we don’t have their records.”

Kel smiled at him. Of course he’d read books.

Neal gave her a clumsy hug.

“I’m glad you don’t think I’m mad,” she informed his collar.

“I never said that. I said I don’t think that this particular escapade is madness.”

“So charming. I can see how you snared Yuki.”

His arms tightened. “So,” he said into her hair. “What should we do now?”

“I want to find out what _happened_ ,” she said, hoping that he would ignore the break in her voice.

“You’re most likely to find that out in Corus,” he pointed out.

“But I can’t go to Corus. I can’t leave New Hope.”

He pulled away a little. “You can, you know. All the rest of us have taken holidays. Some of us have taken two. The Stump occasionally writes to ask if we can coax you out, it’s why he keeps asking you to dine at Mastiff.”

Kel blinked at him. She supposed that he was right. In Narnia, she had never quite had full responsibility, there was always someone, be it fellow officer, or husband, or best friend, or interfering in-law, who could tell her to go and rest, now, and she would know that they could take over. In Tortall, well. She had been too young for her post, had seen how much could go wrong when she left.

“I see what you mean,” she said thoughtfully, and then blinked. “And I know who to ask, in Corus.”

“Who?” Neal asked cautiously. “Oh, Kel, you won’t--”

“The Chamber of the Ordeal ought to know.” It had known about Blayce the Gallan, after all. And it had known that people would come to call her the Protector of the Small. Even if it knew nothing about this, it would still tell her something.

Neal gave her a look like a cat trying to bring up a hairball.

“The Chamber is above petty human considerations,” Kel said. “And it likes me, if it likes anyone.”

“I think that this is a terrible idea.”

“You usually do,” Kel pointed out, and he grabbed for her pillow.

*

Three weeks into his progress down the western border of Narnia, Peter received news that his eldest daughter, Ilane, had been brought to bed of a girl.

 _She has been named Adesina, said the letter from Shireen Baratheon, and she is a fine and healthy child. Ilane is well, but tired, and angry with Maja. She says that she has it in her mind to refuse to bear another child, and is asking Saiet to find a spell by which men may bear babies._

 _Saiet has said that she’ll keep it in mind._

He read the letter to Kel, curled up in their bed, and she smiled. “I wish I could have been there.”

“The child was three weeks early,” Peter said. “If it hadn’t been for that, you would have been.”

“Still,” she said, and her smile widened. “We’re grandparents.”

“In a way, we’ve been grandparents since she told us,” Peter pointed out, and sat down next to her. She leaned against him, warm and familiar, and he twisted to kiss her temple.

“Grandparents,” she repeated. “Should I take up knitting?”

“Please don’t. Lucy and Briony provide us with more than enough knitted goods.”

“Briony’s getting better!” Kel protested. Peter gave her a dubious look. “And I’m sure Adesina will grow into that cardigan eventually.”

“The second head might be a problem.”

Kel laughed, low and soft, and he kissed her cheek, and then her mouth.

“I’ve never slept with a grandmother before,” he observed.

“You haven’t slept with one yet,” she said, and tugged away. “I need to write to Ilane. And tell the escort that I’ll be turning back in the morning. You can’t, but--”

“I can,” objected Peter. “I’m a grandfather. They’ll understand. We’ll come and start back once we’ve met the child, and give alms to everyone we meet.”

“Yes, and I need to organise a distribution of purses,” Kel said, looking distracted. Peter really should have known not to bring up charitable works. “And gifts, and maybe a school in her name, or an orphanage, or a soup kitchen--”

“Right now?”

“The sooner I start, the sooner it will be done,” Kel said firmly, and stood up, going to take her long tabard from its place on the clothes chest. Peter sighed a little as her breeches disappeared beneath the scarlet fabric.

“I’ll be back soon,” Kel said over her shoulder, combing through her hair with her fingers, and clearly deciding not to put it up.

“I’ll be waiting,” Peter said, “Don’t forget to buy wine for the tavern.”

“I was thinking of saying that the Crown would pay for all the night’s drinking,” Kel said, making her way to the door.

“That would work, but buy a barrel for the town square anyway.”

“As my king commands,” she said, faintly mocking, and left. Peter sighed, and kicked his boots off, and lay down on the bed, thinking about his new grand-daughter.

Adesina was a pretty name. After one of Maja’s relatives, he thought, though it had been a while since he had heard them discussing it, or seen one of Shireen’s endless lists, which had little pluses and minuses depending on how likely it was to offend someone. She would probably be dark haired, like her father, and as beautiful as her mother. Ilane had been a beautiful baby, all curls and hazel eyes, with her mother’s snub nose.

Downstairs, someone cheered, and more people joined in. “To the Princess Adesina!” someone else bellowed, and the chorus of that rattled the windows. Peter rose from the bed, and went to look down into the courtyard below. He could see Kel, hair reflecting the flames of the bonfire someone was starting on the cobbles, smiling madly, and, on impulse, he unlatched the window, and leaned out.

“My Duchess?” he called, and everyone looked up at him.

“Your Majesty?” she called back.

“The news is given: come back, I want to celebrate!”

She didn’t flush, she raised an eyebrow at him instead. Not that he could see it, but he knew that she had done it. Some of the Narnians in the forecourt were laughing, and looked as though they would be making jokes as soon as Kel left.

“As the High King commands,” she called back, and swept a bow.

Peter grinned down at her, and retreated, shutting the window, after closing the shutters for good measure. He could time Kel’s arrival exactly: ten steps through the inn’s front hallway (it was not a very big inn, but it was the only one for twenty miles around), fourteen steps on the first staircase, eight on the landing, fourteen on the second, twelve on their landing and--

“So undignified, your majesty,” she said from the doorway.

“Being High King of Narnia for thirty five years means never having to worry about your dignity.”

“So you won’t mind if I tell the boys--” she began, unhooking the tabard.

“Why are you talking about our children at a time like this?” he asked, and kissed her. She kissed him back, settling her arms around his waist, and he raised his hand to muss her ordered hair.

“Grandparents,” he said, and she smiled against his mouth.

“And you protested talking about our--oh.”

“You want me to do that again?” he enquired, pressing the material of her tabard, and then her shirt, aside.

“Of course I do,” she retorted, pressing a kiss to his hairline. Her hands clenched around his waist as he nipped her, and he stepped sideways, bringing them both closer to the bed. Kel’s hand dipped below his waistband at the back, cool against his skin, and he responded by bringing one hand down to unhook the other side of her tabard. She eased away just long enough for him to get it over her head, and he was rewarded by the sight of the flushed v of her chest visible above her shirt lacings. Her hands went to his own shirt lacings, slow and certain, and he growled a little to make her hurry.

“The High King of Narnia,” she said, “Impatient and undignified.” Laughter lurked in her eyes, and he leaned in once more, to kiss it from her lips.


	2. Chapter 2

In the end, Kel rode down to Corus with the Third Company of the King’s Own, who were swapping with Second Company on the Eastern border, and being granted a fortnight of leave in between. They’d picked up a few recruits before they’d left, most of whom stared at Kel with awe. It made things awkward: not the hero-worship, but the way she responded to it. The girl she had been would have been awkward, the woman she was was used to it, and she had to strike some medium between the two, so that the Third didn’t get suspicious.

Most of the time, she rode with Dom, and she was a little surprised at how easy it was to fall back into the rhythm they’d shared. He reminded her of Peter, a little, or maybe Peter had reminded her of him, when he’d been a mercenary called Breakneck, and she’d been Lieutenant Mindelan. Either way, it was nice to ride with him, and flirt, innocuously, the way he flirted with her. It passed the time, at least, as they passed through the borderlands, and down, towards Corus. Unlike on the trip up, they camped out, Kel in her own tent, pitched a little away from the others. That was another oddity, having to be careful of her reputation, having to consider how much time she spent with other men. She saw some of the new recruits raising eyebrows, when she and Dom sat late by the fire, and, for the first few days, she went to bed a little earlier, spent a little more time with Fulcher and Wolset. It didn’t help, though.

On the fifth night, she broke. It was a little chilly, though warm for the North, and, once she had dealt with her dinner utensils, she walked, deliberately, over to the fire Dom was sitting at, and sat down next to him.

“Good evening,” he said, eyeing her a little curiously.

“Good evening,” she said, and, deliberately, leaned against him.

“An interesting choice,” he said into her hair. “What brought it on?”

“Maybe,” she said, “I feel like it.” Dom was warm, and comfortable to lean against. He smelt of horses, and grass, and, after a moment, he brought his arm up around her shoulders.

Over towards another campfire, one of the new recruits was singing, “Her hair is black as pitch, my loves, Her skin as white as stone, Her eyes as blue as the winter skies, And she is the Queen of Bone.”

“Pretty,” remarked Dom, as the last word died away. “I’ve never heard that one before.”

“Probably Scanran,” Kel remarked. It sounded a little like a song she’d heard Liobsynde Fara sing, about the Cailleach Bheur. The same tune, but then, there were only so many tunes.

“I heard a new song about you the other day,” Dom added. “Apparently you’re ten foot tall, with eyes like emeralds.”

“...emeralds?” Kel asked, blinking.

“Emeralds,” he confirmed, smirking a little.

“That is completely the wrong colour.”

“There are no jewels in nature the colour of your eyes,” he pointed out reasonably. “And I doubt they were looking for tree similes.”

“I suppose,” Kel admitted after a moment. Gods, emeralds. What would they think of next? At least Narnian ballads hadn’t completely misrepresented her, though, as with Peter, they had mostly paid attention to the terror she could wreak if she chose.

“I am tired,” Dom sighed against her hair. “I sometimes think I’m getting too old for this.”

“Nonsense,” Kel told him. “I fully expect you to be commanding the Own when lesser men are playing with their grandchildren.”

Peter had managed both, she remembered, and the sharp pain of it surprised her, a little. She turned to look at Dom, and he looked back, as if waiting.

In the firelight, with the differences in colouring elided, he looked like Peter.

No. That wasn’t fair. Not to Peter, and not to Dom, and not to her.

“I’m going to bed,” she said abruptly, and Dom’s arm dropped from around her. She scrambled to her feet, and said, “Night.”

“Night,” he said, frowning a little. “Kel--”

“I should sleep. We need to start early tomorrow,” she added, and turned, heading off towards her tent, leaving Dom still sat by the fire.

Kel dreamed of winter, of standing on the walls of Cair Paravel in a snowstorm so thick that she could not see as far as the sea, no matter how she strained, watching for a ship to come in. The snow piled on her shoulders, and slid down the back of her tunic, and crusted on her lashes, and still she waited, leaning out, into the wind. She didn’t fear the drop below, she barely noticed it.

She just waited.

And then she stood on top of a tower on the Archenland border, and she could see as far as Anvard, despite the fact that she knew the geography didn’t work that way. A great eagle was approaching, tips of wings and tail scarlet in the setting sun. It curved and crested on the wind, and, at last, dropped towards Kel, and she raised her gloved hand to catch it.

It landed, and she woke gasping.

“So close your doors against the night  
Shut out the wild wind’s groan  
Warn your folk and watch your hearths  
And ‘ware the Queen of Bone.”

Kel jerked upright, and winced as her back protested the cold ground she’d been sleeping on. For a moment, she thought she was still in the dream, and expected the eagle to be in the tent, or her lashes to be frozen stiff.

But it wasn’t, and they weren’t.

“You’ve never dreamed true in your life, Keladry of Mindelan,” she told herself firmly. “There’s no reason for you to start now.”

Her chest ached, with loss and cold, and she wanted someone else there, she didn’t care who. Someone she knew, and loved, who would open their blankets to her, and let her crawl in, and complain about her cold feet. Someone who would warm her.

There was no one there who could do that, though, and no one for her to talk to, especially not at this time of night. The shilouettes through the tent walls suggested that the only people up were the ones on watch.

She wrapped herself up in her blanket again, as tight as she could, and went back to sleep.  
*

Peter knew that something was wrong by the silence when he arrived at Cair Paravel. No, not silence precisely, just a sense of something wrong, tingling against his teeth. Cair Paravel was his, more than anything ever had or ever would be, and he could read her, her moods and currents, like a book.

Astra felt it too, and shifted uneasily as he dismounted, and unstrapped her girth. “I’ll get someone else to do it,” she said, and nudged him with her head. “You go and see what’s amiss.”

“Thank you,” Peter said, hand lingering on her flank, and turned and ran, the Guard on his heels.

Tumnus met him in the passage. He looked fretful, and worried, fiddling with the fringe of his scarf, and Peter stopped, and waited, just a second.

“It’s Lady Alysanne,” Tumnus said. “The Duchess took her to your rooms.”

There was only one Duchess, in this context: Keladry.

“What happened?” he demanded. Barging in without knowing all the facts he could would help no one, and might very well make things worse.

“I don’t know, your Majesty,” Tumnus said. “Her Grace has not allowed anyone to speak of it. Queen Susan and Prince Jaime are there with her.” That was hardly surprising. Edmund had never taken much interest in Alysanne, confining himself to name day gifts, and a golden cup presented to the Treasury on her birth, and Brienne had been their lover, once. When parenting was needed and Brienne was away, they had stepped into the breech.

Now that Brienne was dead, they had simply adopted her.

“My thanks,” Peter said hurriedly, and went on, up and up. Cair Paravel helped him, adding twists to staircases where there had been none, extending hallways, until he came out into the hallway outside his rooms through what he was fairly certain had been a portrait of King Rickert and Queen Briant when he’d last checked.

The great cats of Kel and Susan’s Guards were crouched outside the doorway, and raised their heads at his advance, prickling into danger before they recognised him. They cleared his path in silence, and Peter raised his hand, and tapped.

There was silence, and then footsteps, slow, until Kel opened the door.

“You’re back,” she said, and there was nothing but pure relief in her voice; not surprise at his early arrival, or interest in what had happened.

“I’m back,” he said, and took her free hand. “Can I come in?”

“Of course,” she said, opened the door a little wider, and tugged him in. The room was darker than it should have been, before sunset-- the curtains were drawn, and candles lit, and a bright fire burnt in the hearth. Jaime, Susan, and Alysanne were all sat around it, looking over at them, Susan straight backed in a wing chair, Jaime on one half of the sofa, with Alysanne curled up in his lap. His golden hand held her in place, and he stroked her hair with the other, slow and gentle.

“I didn’t mean to do it,” Alysanne said frantically, as soon as she saw him, “I didn’t, please, your Majesty, don’t send me away, please, don’t give me to the hags--”

“Ssh,” Susan said, and leaned over to press a strand of curling dark hair behind her ear. “No one’s going to send you away, darling. We promised, remember?”

Alysanne looked distinctly dubious. Peter crossed the room-- not too fast and not too slow, Kel just behind him.

“Why would you think I was going to do that?” he asked, and crouched in front of her. It made his knees ache, but he didn’t let that matter.

Alysanne withdrew her arms from the blanket, and held them out, and Peter hissed. They were ringed with burns, in the shape of snakes, twisting from her pulsepoint, up inside her shift.

“I didn’t mean to!” she said again, “I promise, I’ll never do it again, I didn’t mean--”

“Sweetheart,” Kel said, and leaned over to stroke her back. “You’ve done nothing wrong.”

“What happened here, then?” Peter asked.

“I was playing with the fire,” Alysanne mumbled.

“Well--”

“It didn’t hurt. It doesn’t. Only then Lady Elsinora came in, and she wrapped me in a carpet, and it caught fire, and it hurt then, and I screamed, and she called me a hag brat--”

Peter shut his eyes. “I see.”

Alysanne started crying, and Jaime kissed her hair and hushed her. Susan and Kel both gave Peter mildly reproachful looks. Not that he could see them, but he knew that they would be.

“Just like my brother,” Kel said cheerily. “Only he set fire to my Grandmamma’s library carpet. Grandmamma was not amused, I can tell you that.”

Alysanne sniffed, and Peter pulled a handkerchief out of his sleeve, and wiped her nose.

“You haven’t done anything wrong,” he informed her. “You’re a sorceress. It’s a little unexpected, but it can be dealt with. The Shoushani Ambassadress is an initiate of Puca Dolios, after all.”

“But she’s Shoushani,” Alysanne said. “I’m Narnian, and I’m a witch, and witches are bad.”

Peter wasn’t honestly sure he had the energy for a ‘Not all witches are evil, it’s just that the White Witch gave them a bad name’ talk, especially since all his previous experiences had been telling his children that they shouldn’t be afraid of visiting witches, not that it was alright to be one themselves.

“You are Narnian,” Kel said firmly. “And you’re five. You’re not evil. Evil people are generally rather bigger. Ten at least.”

“Oh,” Alysanne said.

“So what we will do,” Peter said, taking the initiative, “Is sleep on it. And in the morning, your Uncle Jaime, and Aunt Susan, and Aunt Kel and I will know what to do.”

“And for now,” said Jaime, “You can have marzipan animals before you go to bed. Two of them.”

“And hot milk with honey,” Kel added.

Alysanne perked up visibly, and Jaime handed her to Peter long enough for him to stand, and took her back.

“Come along, pumpkin,” he said, and kissed Alysanne’s hair again. “Bedtime for tired children.”

“‘m not tired,” Alysanne protested as he carried her away, and Peter gave thanks for the mercurial temperaments and short memories of five year olds. They were a little like goldfish, that way.

“I,” Kel said, “have spoken with Lady Elsinora, and informed her that she is on very thin ice indeed. I am not entirely sure that she believes me.”

“The idiot thinks that any magic is evil,” Susan sighed. “And neither of us felt like explaining matters to her until Alysanne was calmed down. Thank you for that, by the way. Apparently someone’s been telling her stories about Peter Witch-Slayer, and she was convinced you were going to behead her.” Her tone suggested certain doom if it turned out that any of her children were the storyteller in question, and the look on Kel’s face suggested that the same applied to theirs.

“In that case,” Peter said. “I will go and speak to Lady Elsinora. At once.”

“Very good,” Kel said. “I will go and get those marzipan mice.”

They walked together as far as the Great Staircase, swapping news of the lesser things that had happened while he was away: Tyrion and Anders had been caught sneaking off to the Shifting Market in search of wine, and had been confined to their rooms for several days, Peter had met with several regional magistrates, and thought that a judicial review was in order.

“We can give it to Edmund,” Kel said, with more asperity than usual. Peter didn’t bother to ask why, just kissed her hand, punctiliously, and then her cheek, and then her mouth.

“Go,” Kel said into his ear. “Bring justice.”

“I shall try,” he said, and turned to the faun standing next to him. “Lady Elsinora?”

“In the Library Gallery, your Majesty,” the faun said, and Peter nodded, and headed for it.

He heard Ilane speaking from the top of the stairs.

“You will pack your bags,” she said, “And you will leave. At once.”

“Your highness, it is too late to travel--” Lady Elsinora protested.

“Then you may spend the night in a tavern. But you will not spend it here.”

“Your highness, I have done nothing--”

“You slapped her,” Ilane said, and Peter stopped on the stairs. He had not seen-- but then, he had not seen Alysanne’s left cheek, which had been pressed against Jaime the entire time. “She had done nothing wrong, and you slapped her.”

“Your highness, it is best that such-- such wickedness, be stamped out as soon as possible.”

“Wickedness? She’s five. The most wicked thing she’s ever done is steal biscuits. The only thing that can turn her wicked, at this age, is being told that she is. You, on the other hand, slapped a five year old child, a child in your care. You will leave. At once, and be grateful Shireen took that horsewhip away from me. Not that I usually whip anyone, but I’ll make an exception for you.”

“Your father--”

“Her father,” Peter said, descending the rest of the staircase, “agrees entirely.” Lady Elsinora, caught in the middle of dipping a curtsey, went white, and then a rather blotchy red. Ilane lifted her chin, and smiled.

“Pack your bags,” he said. “And leave this court. Since my daughter has chosen to be more lenient than you deserve, you may spend the night in the Shifting Market, but I expect you to depart at dawn tomorrow, and I never want to see you in Cair Paravel again. Now. Go.”

She ran, the clatter of her shoes the only sound. It wasn’t until the door at the end of the gallery slammed that Peter spoke.

“Nicely done, Ilane. A little merciful, but that’s not always a fault.”

Ilane shook her head. “I should have done it earlier. Only I didn’t know, and Saiet asked me to delay a little--”

“Why?”

“I think she and Briony are boobytrapping Lady Elsinora’s clothing.”

“Good,” Peter said consideringly. “Alysanne’s getting marzipan animals, but I suspect you’re a little old for them.”

“No,” Ilane said immediately. “That’s not possible.”

“Kitchens, then?”

“Let’s,” Ilane said, and took his arm. Peter pressed an absent kiss to her hair: straight and blonde, like his, the same as the shape of her face but she had Kel’s hazel eyes and snub nose, as well as the sweet mouth and stubborn jaw.

She was already a terror, and it was only going to get worse, and Peter was rather glad that he would be there to see it.

*

Six months before Midwinter, the Chapel of the Ordeal was swept, and garnished, and as deserted as the crypts of Guenever during Stranger’s Night. Kel’s boot heels echoed off the stone as she entered, then paused, with her hand on the farthest pew, and made her way to the front.

It gave easily to her hand. Her stance as she entered was entirely different: she had dealt with more terrifying things than it, those last thirty years, and if the gods of the sea having a screeching marital argument and drowning all shipping in a fifty mile radius didn’t do for her, nothing would.

She stood on a wide open plain, nothing but bare, parched earth as far as the eye could see. The spirit of the Chamber appeared before her, the androgynous face as expressionless as ever.

“Keladry of Mindelan,” it observed, then, “No. Keladry of Glasswater, Duchess of Glasswater, Princess-Consort of Narnia, Empress of the Lone Islands, Lady of Cair Paravel and Knight of the Order of the Lion.”

“And General of the Armies of Narnia.” Kel added.

“And a General. An unexpected surprise.”

“You surprise me, Chamber. Do you not speak with Aslan?”

An expression flickered on the Chamber’s features, faster than she could catch, and she smiled a little. No point in dissembling, not here. The Chamber read your innermost self, after all.

“I do,” it said. “But, having gone, I did not expect you to return. Then again, I did not expect you to leave.”

“I see.”

“I doubt it. You are a mortal, after all.”

Kel considered being offended, then discarded it.

“It might,” the Chamber observed, “have been better if you had not returned.”

Kel waited, and the plain dissolved around her.

She stood where the lionsroad became the Shifting Market, the outer boundaries of Cair Paravel marked in white chalk markers that kept dissolving in the rain. It was, as always, lined with people, buying and selling, gossiping and browsing, and just passing the time of day. It was late summer, and warm with it, though the leaves were near to turning.

She saw people stop, and turn, and heard the hoofbeats, the distinctive sound of galloping horses. With the crowd, she turned to see who it was.

Two horses, both with boots backwards in their riderless saddles, blown and exhausted but galloping flat out all the same. Her own Tegwen was in the lead, and James’s Sior behind her.

Others recognised them as well, and Kel heard the whispers growing: The Duchess and Prince James both? How can this be? What enemy did this?

But none of them tried to ask, tried to stop the horses on their way to Cair Paravel. They just watched, and whispered.

Kel turned towards the castle, and saw her own standard-- at half mast, to show that she was not in residence, though it was her residence, being lowered.

The scene changed around her, the tough grass beneath her boots becoming cool stone. She stood in a cave, the walls slick with damp, and her eldest daughter, Ilane, stood in the centre, undressing before the gaze of men and women in loose white shifts. Her split riding skirts lay on the cave floor already, spattered in mud, and as Kel watched she unlaced her embroidered linen shirt, and stripped that off as well, leaving her in shift, stockings, and good leather boots.

“You should have come like this to the caves,” one of the men said disapprovingly.

“It is common enough that I take a horse, even if not a Horse-- and go riding in the mornings,” Ilane pointed out, standing on one foot to get her boot off. It was well made, and took some tugging that nearly overbalanced her. “Going in my nightclothes would have aroused suspicion, rather.”

The man snorted, and added. “Remember your jewels, your Majesty. You must take nothing but what Narnia has given you.”

“This is Narnian gold,” Ilane said, and managed to get the other boot off, hitching her shift up to untie her garters. The people around her averted their eyes as she wrestled with the tight knots, then stripped them off so that she stood barefoot, toes curling against the stone.

“Your jewels,” the man repeated, and Ilane looked at her hands, and, very slowly, tugged at her wedding ring. It came slowly as well, almost grudgingly, and nearly stuck at the knuckle, until she twisted it and it came over.

“It is unnatural,” the man informed her. “It came not like that from Narnian soil.”

“I’m keeping the sword,” Ilane said, instead of replying. “It was a gift from Father Christmas, and so it will not disturb the ritual.”

“I do not think, your highness--”

“Narnia has always liked it,” Ilane added, hazel eyes sharp. “I may go naked to my death-- well, nearly so-- but I shall not go unarmed.”

The man exchanged glances with his companions, and eventually said. “Very well, your majesty.”

“Good,” Ilane said, and belted the sword around her waist, then held out her hand. “Now, let us begin.”

The man took out a dagger: small and crude, a stone blade, and gashed her palm open. The blood rose, fast and dark red, and Ilane cupped her hand so that pooled, then raised it to her lips. Kel saw her tongue move, once, and then she turned her hand upside down, so that the blood splattered to the ground, over her bare feet.

“I’m ready,” Ilane said, and raised her head, hair falling down around her shoulders. “Take me, Narnia.”

Her lips were red with her own blood, and, somewhere below them, the world crunched.

When Ilane brought her head down, it wasn’t Ilane anymore.

“Come, my Lords,” said the spirit of Narnia in Ilane’s body. “To the sacrifice. There is much to be done.”

The scene changed again, and Kel was back at Cair Paravel, standing in Ilane’s rooms. They looked as though they had been struck by a hurricane, chests thrown open, wardrobes with the doors near off the hinges, linens and clothing and weaponary scattered everywhere. Ilane’s husband, Maja, and their lover, Shireen, stood at the eye of the storm, throwing things: gowns and tunics and Ilane’s petty jewels, into trunks for transport.

“You can’t go,” said her son William from the door. He looked tense and desperate, dressed in black, with his eyes rimmed with red. His carefully trimmed goatee had become a full beard, and it was badly trimmed.

“I’ll not stay and see my children killed,” Maja said, and took Ilane’s primary jewel case, sorting between her personal jewels, and those that belonged to the crown.

“No one would harm them--” William said desperately. “Not Adesina and Peter--”

“You might have said that of Saiet,” said Shireen from the floor, and she shut one of the overflowing trunks. A bit of tunic stuck out: blue, with thin gold braid, and she tugged at it, absently.

“Go and see to your own house,” said Maja, not unkindly. “I’ll take care of mine.”

William’s fist opened, and closed, and the scene changed once more-- Gods, how many of them could there be?

This place, she recognised. She stood on a killing field in Lasci, where once she had put down a rebellion, and saved a baby from the ashes. Now, two armies had taken to the field-- one Shoushani, the other Narnian, with William in command.

He was losing. Even as she watched, his standard bearer fell, and another man caught it up, only to fall in his turn. William, in his mail and boiled leather, fought desperately on foot, but he was fighting knights on horse back, dodging bodies of men and beasts and Narnians.

A mounted knight attacked him from above, blows raining down, buckling Will’s shield with his flail, so that Will was weighed down, but could not abandon it, the metal twisted around his arm. He fought on, with his good arm, but it was no avail-- one slash of the sword the knight had swapped for the abandoned flail took off sword and swordhand both.

The knight’s second slash felled him for good.

The battlefield faded, becoming a forest glade, alight with music and laughter, men and women and Narnians in all combinations, and Bacchus in the middle, gold in the firelight, dripping faun wine into her daughter Adalia’s mouth.

Dally drank it eagerly, lapping left over drops from her lips, and laughed when Bacchus sloshed some over her front, and bent to lick it off.

“Adalia,” he crooned, “Dear Adalia. Such a maenad, you shall be: will she not, my girls?”

“Such a maenad,” one of them agreed, laughing. The music changed pitch, and Bacchus smiled. Kel remembered hearing warnings, about Bacchus’s music. It took control of you, of your body and your mind. It killed men, and made women run mad, made them kill their babies in the cradle, and stab their husbands with spindles. She could see it affecting the women in the glade, could see one of them throttling a man, another juggling knives and tossing them off in all directions. But she was apart from it, even as the glade disappeared.

She stood in Cair Paravel once more, Cair Paravel under seige, rotting curtains flying in the sea wind, and broken furniture tumbled on the floors. She was in her bedchamber, and the great bed had collapsed, ticking spilling moulding feathers onto the floor. The tapestries hung by threads, the carpets were eaten away by mice. Outside the window were catapults, and armies with the banners of Natare, and Lasci, and Shoushan, like hyenas fighting over the corpse of a lion.

“They’re our allies,” she protested, looking out. “We have a marriage alliance with Shoushan, and Lasci’s been ours for nearly twenty years--”

“Alliances fall,” the Chamber said. “All human Empires fall, in time. But the Golden Age of Narnia ended sooner than it might have, though not as soon as some wished.”

“Oh,” Kel said. She didn’t even want to know what had happened to her children-not-of-blood, to Nadia and Briony. She had a horrible feeling that she could guess. Briony had been expert in blending blazebalm, after all, and one of the few Narnians who knew the precise recipe for black powder. She wondered if it had been the Chamber’s idea of mercy, not to show her that.

He hadn’t shown her Anders either, she realised, wiping her eyes. Surely Cor would have sheltered him. Anders was his son-in-law, after all, the father of his only grandson.

But then, maybe Cor had looked to Archenland’s best interests, and thrown him to the wolves.

There was cold stone beneath her knees, and her cheeks were stiff with dried tear tracks. The Chamber had gone, and there was nothing around her but stone. She eased to her feet, and opened the door of the Chamber, stumbling a little as she made it out, and sank down onto the front pew. Dead. So many of them dead, and maybe she could have helped, if she had been there.

She shut her eyes. _Oh Queen of Ravens, my children. Oh, Lady of the Lone Lands, please be kind to my children._

*

By the time Peter made it back to Cair Paravel, his youngest daughter was a day old.

It was hardly a surprise: all of Kel’s labours had been easy, and he could not have wished a long and painful one on her, just so that he could be there when she was born, but it stung a little, all the same.

“It’s your own fault,” Astra informed him haughtily, when the Griffin brought the news. “If you hadn’t decided to inspect the dams, you would have been there.”

It was no use reminding her that Peter had tried to get out of it, and, when that had failed, left early and ridden hard so that he would be back, until the rain had turned the roads to mush. Riding in that would have gained him a broken leg, and the Griffins could not fly, and so he had sat in a riverside inn, watching as the water level rose, and listening as bets were placed on whether it would flood, while his wife gave birth. Instead, he said:

“Well, hurry up. I would like to see her before she’s grown.”

“Humph,” Astra informed him, and started trotting before he was ready, so that she jounced him.

They reached Cair Paravel as the sun came out, and were greeted by Ilane, Saiet, and Emery, who were sat on a low wall near the gate, waiting. Saiet and Emery appeared to be playing cards, and Ilane was polishing her sword. Peter reined in next to them, and reminded himself to get her a new one, she was almost tall enough for a full size, hand and a half bastard sword, and she would be by the time one was made to his standards. It was more properly her knightmaster’s duty, but she would not go to Cor for a few months yet, until her fourteenth birthday.

“You’re late,” Ilane informed the sword.

“I know dear,” he said. “But give your Mama a chance to skin me before you start in?”

“She’s very pretty,” Saiet said, looking up momentarily, “Everyone says she has your nose, though it mostly looks like a blob.” She looked back to the cards, and absently reached over to tug the ones Emery had filched out of his sleeve.

“I’ll take Astra,” Emery volunteered, apparently to avoid Saiet’s superior eyebrow. “If that’s alright with you, Astry?”

“It is,” Astra answered. “As long as you refrain from calling me ‘Astry’, of all things, and make sure to comb my tail _properly_.”

“Yes’m,” Emery said, and slid off the wall as Peter dismounted.

“Coming, Laney?” he asked, and Ilane considered this for a moment, and got off the wall.

“If I must.”

“Hey!” said Saiet. “Who am I supposed to play cards with now?”

“Go play with Corin,” Ilane said. “He was saying last night how experienced he is. He deserves a fleecing.”

“Experienced at--” Peter started.

“I didn’t ask,” Ilane said primly, and wrapped her arm in his. “Don’t worry, Papa. I’ll sort things out.”

“Without a diplomatic incident, I hope.”

“Well, without a very big one,” she said, looking down, and he decided that it was probably best not to ask, in case Susan tried to yell at him later.

“Mama hasn’t named her yet,” she said as they started up the stairs. “She said that she wanted you to be there. Everyone’s been saying that it’s bad luck, and the Cailleach Bheur might steal her away, or Puca Dolios.”

“They said that about your brother Will as well,” Peter reminded her. “He wasn’t named for a week.”

“I wish they could have taken him,” Ilane said with a scowl. “He chewed my favourite scarf, then took it outside to tie up the twins’ dolls with.”

“He’ll get better when he’s bigger.”

“That’s what you always say,” she sighed. “And none of them have. Except maybe Vanna. And Briony, and Nadia, but they’ve both gone away.”

“Still,” Peter said, and was about to make a remark about how well they would get on when they grew up, before he remembered the last time Lucy and Edmund had needed to discuss the diamond mines in the north. “Anyway! She has my nose?”

“Yes,” Ilane said. “And your eyes too, everyone says they’re not dark enough to be like Mama’s.”

Peter considered this.

“That is a very soppy smile,” Ilane said dismissively, and they came to the Great Bedroom. The passageway outside was lined with courtiers and Ambassadors, all bearing gifts. Peter did wonder precisely what the Mattie Ambassador expected her to do with a jewelled penknife. Even they wouldn’t start her on weapons training until she could walk.

He passed through them, nodding in both directions, and went through the door.

“You’re late,” Kel informed him immediately.

“So everyone has been telling me,” he said, and kicked the door shut behind him. Kel was on the bed, with a linen wrapped bundle in her arms. Vanna was asleep on a long-suffering leopard in front of the fire, and James appeared to be attempting to drown Anders in a bucket of water.

“Don’t drown your brother,” he added, and went over to the bed.

She didn’t look like anything much, but then, none of the children had, at that point. She just looked like a baby, red and wriggly, and, when he took her from Kel’s arms, warm, and terrifyingly light.

“Hello, my sweet,” he said, and looked down into her pale, cloudy, eyes. “What shall we call you then?”

“I thought you could decide,” Kel said, and reached up to put a hand on his arm. “I named Vanna, after all, so I think it’s your turn now.”

“So it is,” he agreed, and looked down at the baby. Susan had already had Helen, for one of her twins, and no child alive looked like an Alberta. Further back, his maternal grandmother had been called Muriel, which she didn’t look like either, and his other grandmother had been Susan. Maybe--

“You had a sister, didn’t you?”

“I had three. And two sisters in law. Which one?”

“Adalie?”

“Adalia. And Oranie.”

“Well. How about Adalia?”

Kel smiled, slowly. “Yes. She’s an Adalia.”

“Adalia Pevensie,” Peter said, and kissed her forehead. “You’ll be a Duchess as soon as I can find you a territory, my dear.”

“Shall I go tell people?” Ilane asked. “And James can too, once he’s got Anders clean.”

“I’m not dirty!” Anders yelped.

“Are,” James said. “What were you doing with that mud, bathing in it?”

“Um.”

“Filthy,” sighed Ilane, and dodged Anders’ swipe.

“Not in my bedroom,” said Kel.

“Go and tell them,” Peter agreed, and sat down next to Kel, handing the baby back, so that he could kiss her properly.

“Are you and Corin going to be like that?” he heard Anders ask behind him.

“No fear,” Ilane said, and swept out, shutting the door behind her.

“We should--” Peter started, belatedly remembering.

“Ilane can take care of it,” Kel said airily. “And we have a new baby. None of us are going to sleep for the next six months.”

“I confess, I didn’t miss that about Vanna.”

“Lucky you,” Kel said, and sighed a little as Adalia began to cry.

*

Adalia had told her to come to Nond House for dinner; she was there with her children. With her husband away, it was Corus, or to stay with her mother in law, and, she had confided in her last letter, spending too much time with Lady Florizile made her long for a glaive.

Kel arrived two hours before sundown, with gifts for her niece and nephew. She had seen her niece, Nannetta, before she headed North-- she had been born a few months before Kel had been knighted, a bare five months after the wedding, which had apparently given Lady Florizile palpitations, but little Aris had been born while she was in Scanra, and she had never met him.

A maid met her at the door, bobbing a curtsey, and murmuring:

“M’lady’s up in the nurseries, Lady Knight. Your cloak?” and, with the slick, well polished behaviour of practiced servants, Kel was divested of cloak and riding gloves, and ushered up to the Nond nurseries. Adie’s letters had said that they had not been used in years, since Merovec’s father was a boy: his brother had died of the Sweating Sickness, and he had not wanted to raise his children where he would see his brother everywhere that he went. They had large windows, and bright rag rugs on the floor, and for a moment, as the maid led her in, Kel looked at them, and thought of the Cair Paravel nurseries, of chasing her sons around the rocking horse and the cart, while the Guard watched, and mocked them lazily.

Then Adalia said “Kel!” and jumped to her feet in a flurry of butter yellow skirts, reaching to hug her tightly. She was a little smaller than Kel, and her curls ran up her nose.

“Um,” Kel said into her hair, and Adalia tightened her grip.

“Oh, I’ve missed you. Why didn’t you stay with us? You must be so lonely, up at the Palace!”

“I’m not,” Kel started, but Adalia was barrelling on, keeping an arm around her waist as she turned to the nursery maid, and the little girl sitting on the rug, playing with dolls.

“Nanna, sweetheart, your Aunt Kel’s here!”

Nannetta considered her for a moment, then lifted her doll, and waved it at her. “Aunt Kel!”

“It’s meant to be you,” Adie said confidingly. “Conal brought them-- he said he was exceedingly bored last winter during a snowstorm, and made little figures of all of us.”

“Aunt Kel!” repeated Nanna. “Glaive!”

“Yes, sweetheart,” Adalia said to her, smiling, and tugged Kel with her to kneel on the carpet. “Aris is still asleep,” she added, as Kel took the offered doll. It hasdshort brown hair, and a little glaive in its hand, and it was a fairly good carving, for a toy three inches long.

Nanna followed it up by climbing into Kel’s lap, and Kel put her arms around her, as familiar as anything, and pressed a kiss to her hair. Just like her own children. Just like Ilane after a nightmare, or Dally when she’d fallen down again, or Briony, when Kel came back from the border, with Feodor’s blood on her hands.

“You’re good with children,” Adalia said approvingly, and clapped a hand to her mouth. “Oh, I promised I wouldn’t do that. I always hated it when people said that to me when I was betrothed.”

“And I’m not even betrothed,” Kel managed, looking at Nanna’s curly hair. She was here because she loved her sister, she was here because she wanted to see the children, and she could not let this pain her.

“Do they have many, at New Hope? You must tell me all about it, at dinner,” Adalia said.

“A fair few,” Kel agreed, and let Nanna squirm out of her arms, and into her mother’s. “How’s Merovec?”

“Well,” Adalia said with a shrug. “He’s commanding the defence on the Nond’s border lands, still, and he says that very little has happened, since that monster from Galla was defeated.” She pressed an unconcious kiss to Nanna’s hair, and Kel tried not to remember the occasional nightmares she had had, where she walked into Blayce’s workroom to find her own children on the slab, where Stenmun took them in the night, or she fought a killing machine that screamed with their voices.

Between her and Peter, she sometimes thought it was a wonder any of them had ever been let out of Cair Paravel. Not that that, any of it, was a productive line of thought, not when she was visiting her sister.

“She wants to be a knight, don’t you my darling?” Adalia was asking Nanna, who nodded enthusiastically.

“She might change her mind,” Kel pointed out. “Children do.”

“You never did,” Adalia said, and leaned over to kiss her cheek, trapping Nanna between them for a moment. “You always wanted to be a knight.”

“Well,” Kel said. “Maybe she’ll be true.” Ilane had been, after all.

Nanna squawked, and waved her arms around, and Aris started crying, and Adalia jumped to her feet, handed Nanna down, and rushed off. Nanna put her little arms around Kel’s neck, and Kel shut her eyes. She smelt of baby, and milk, and soft, sweet things. Her daughters had smelt of that, once, and her sons, when they had been so small that she could take them with her on campaign, or when she was managing frontier affairs.

Adalia came back, with Aris in her arms. “Here you are, my darling,” she said to him. “Here’s your Aunt Kel. She’s like your Aunt Oranie, except slightly better at using weapons.”

“Slightly?” Kel inquired. “Oranie once fell over her own glaive.”

“It was our first lesson!” Adalia protested. “And that glaive was taller than you were. You were five, so it wasn’t as much of a trick then as it would be now, but still.”

“It isn’t much of a precedent,” Kel said, and sniffed, and tried not to remember her own Adalia, who had known how to fight, and hadn’t enjoyed it, and hadn’t been at all good at it. All Adalia had wanted was a library, and a good drink.

She wondered if Bacchus had a library, if Adalia would spend the rest of her days, however long they were, reading plays and poems born out of madness.

“We’ll just have to get you to teach him,” her sister Adalia said, and Kel pulled herself back to the present.

“Not Merovec? Or his brothers?”

“Oh, Merovec agrees,” Adalia said, and cradled Aris close. Kel reached out, and Adalia handed him over.

“Hello sweetheart,” she said, and pressed her lips to his forehead. His hand batted, and closed on her shirt.

Kel shut her eyes, and tried to anchor herself in the present.

**Author's Note:**

> Fiorenza Paolucci appears in [Four Things Greater.](http://bedlamsbard.livejournal.com/465363.html)
> 
> Osumare Seaworth appears in [The Coastwise Lights.](http://bedlamsbard.livejournal.com/488548.html)


End file.
